Steve Reich é um compositor americano, um dos principais expoentes da música minimalista (ao lado de Philip Glass e Terry Riley), tendência que ganhou destaque no cenário da música erudita contemporânea, a partir de meados dos anos 60. o estilo de Reich, que explora repetições de figuras rítmicas, loopings, cânones, transformações harmônicas lentas e outros recursos, fez escola, influenciando uma série de outros compositores e grupos de músicos.
When I worked on a speech piece like It’s Gonna Rain, the idea was to hear “it’s gonna rain.” I recorded that in 1964, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. I was in San Francisco then and thought we might be going up in so much radioactive smoke. With that hovering in the background and this preacher laying it down about the flood and Noah, it really had a lot of resonance. So I wanted people to hear the words; I didn’t want to disguise them. Personally, at that time, I was going through a divorce, and the piece is extremely dark. The second part of the work is a much longer loop ending with Brother Walter’s words about people knocking on the door of the ark – “but it had been sealed by the hand of God” – and the whole long loop doesn’t reconstruct and come back together, it goes further and further out of phase until it is reduced to noise. The feeling is that you’re experiencing what it’s like to have everything completely dissolve into chaos.
FRAGMENTO DA ENTREVISTA COM JONATHAN COTT (NY 1996)